[Footnote A:  Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.]

Even here, there is implied that the motive comes otherwise than by knowledge; still, taking these earlier poems as a whole, we may say that in them knowledge is regarded as means to morality and not as in any sense contrasted with or destructive of it.  Man’s motives are rational motives; the ends he seeks are ends conceived and even constituted by his intelligence, and not purposes blindly followed as by instinct and impulse.

                        “Why live,
  Except for love—­how love, unless they know?"[B]

[Footnote B:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1327-1328.]

asks the Pope.  Moral progress is not secured apart from, or in spite of knowledge.  We are not exhorted to reject the verdict of the latter as illusive, in order to confide in a faith which not only fails to receive support from the defective intelligence, but maintains its own integrity only by repudiating the testimony of the reason.  In the distinction between knowledge as means and love as end, it is easy, indeed, to detect a tendency to degrade the former into a mere temporary expedient, whereby moral ends may be served.  The poet speaks of “such knowledge as is possible to man.”  The attitude he assumes towards it is apologetic, and betrays a keen consciousness of its limitation, and particularly of its utter inadequacy to represent the infinite.  In the speech of the Pope—–­which can scarcely be regarded otherwise than as the poet’s own maturest utterance on the great moral and religious questions raised by the tragedy of Pompilia’s death—­we find this view vividly expressed:—­

  “O Thou—­as represented here to me
  In such conception as my soul allows,—­
  Under Thy measureless, my atom width!—­
  Man’s mind, what is it but a convex glass
  Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
  Picked out of the immensity of sky,
  To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,
  Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?"[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1308-1315.]

God is “appreciable in His absolute immensity solely by Himself,” while, “by the little mind of man, He is reduced to littleness that suits man’s faculty.”  In these words, and others that might be quoted, the poet shows that he is profoundly impressed with the distinction between human knowledge, and that knowledge which is adequate to the whole nature and extent of being.  And in Christmas-Eve he repudiates with a touch of scorn, the absolute idealism, which is supposed to identify altogether human reason with divine reason; and he commends the German critic for not making

           “The important stumble
  Of adding, he, the sage and humble,
  Was also one with the Creator."[A]

[Footnote A:  Christmas-Eve.]